Ilsa Crown had called her husband foolish for agreeing to appear. None of his colleagues who ran breweries in Chicago had the nerve to speak to a cold-water crowd. The General insisted he’d faced worse in the Civil War and Cuba in ’98 (this Ilsa reported to Fritzi later). Besides, he might do some good.
Twenty minutes into the speech, he clutched the podium, his knees gave way, and he fell sideways.
Ilsa’s telegram reached Fritzi in that mecca of culture, Palatka, Florida. She was appearing with the Mortmain Royal Shakespeare Combination, a seedy professional company with which she’d apprenticed in 1901. The Mortmain Combination brought the Bard and other classic dramatists to the border and cotton South—what Ian Mortmain’s collection of washed-up artistes called “the kerosene circuit” because Southern theater owners apparently had never heard of electric footlights, or were too cheap to cast technical pearls before swinish audiences.
Moments after reading the telegram, Fritzi gave her notice to Ian Mortmain. That night she caught a train for Chicago, to help take care of her father. Never entirely smooth tempered, the General would not be an ideal patient for Fritzi’s mother. His recuperation in bed would tax Ilsa; she, too, lacked the patience and energy of her younger years.
Though Ilsa didn’t ask her daughter to come home, Fritzi believed she could help, and thought it her duty. Besides, after four years of midnight train rides, bug-ridden hotel rooms, gallons of greasy white chicken gravy and biscuits hard as stove bolts—after repetitive visits to dreary mill and cotton and tobacco towns, each with its enclave of Negro shanties—after sloppy rehearsals with the male actors hung over, sleazy productions with the flats threatening to totter, not to mention audiences that wouldn’t know fine acting from hog calling—after all that Fritzi felt she’d learned as much as she could from her four-year apprenticeship.
The General left his sickbed far too soon for Ilsa or his physician. He went back to driving himself off to the brewery at six every morning, to put in his usual ten- to twelve-hour day. Fritzi had planned on staying only a short time, and her father never invoked his illness to induce her to prolong her visit. Somehow it just happened.
To fill her time she kept as busy as possible. She was faithful about daily exercise—morning set-ups in her room, tennis, cycling, swimming in season. She joined a local amateur dramatic society, playing everything from a heroine in a Clyde Fitch melodrama to Mrs. Alving in a private reading of Ghosts—private because Mr. Ibsen’s play was still too controversial for the group to perform publicly.
When she wasn’t rehearsing, she painted scenery, sewed costumes, distributed leaflets to drum up trade. She soon realized her ambition went beyond that of her fellow players, who wanted little more than praise from Aunt Bea or Cousin Elwood, whether merited or not. A few who were married sought furtive liaisons. Fritzi had rebuffed one such masher with her trusty hat pin.
The wind raked her face and hummed in her ears as she pedaled into the downtown, where sleepy citizens were dragging to work and even the dray horses seemed to move with an early morning lethargy. The wind’s murmur couldn’t hide a faintly taunting inner voice.
You’d better get on, my girl.
The voice belonged to an imaginary companion who’d been with Fritzi for years. She was the magnificent and regal Ellen Terry, goddess of the international stage. Fritzi had seen Miss Terry as Ophelia opposite Henry Irving’s Hamlet when the couple toured America in the 1890s. The great lady was pictured in a colored lithograph hanging on the wall above Fritzi’s bed. The litho reproduced John Singer Sargent’s famous full-figure portrait of Terry as Lady Macbeth. Fritzi had stood endlessly before the painting when it was exhibited at the 1892 Columbian Exposition. Ellen Terry had not been her initial inspiration for an acting career; that was a magical production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream she had attended with Mama and Papa when she was seven. As Fritzi walked out of that matinee into the glare of the day, her course was set forever. Miss Terry later became her favorite star, the supreme emblem of her ambition.
That Fritzi held silent dialogues with a nonexistent person didn’t strike her as bizarre, though she didn’t make a habit of telling others. She considered the conversations a natural part of the life of the imagination, and she had a very vivid one. Typically, Ellen Terry offered comments about Fritzi’s shortcomings, something like a personified conscience.
Remember how old you’ll be next month.
She was annoyed; she needed no further reminders that, come January, she would be but a scant four years from thirty, the threshold of “spinsterhood,” a state devoutly to be avoided by proper young women.
Of course, proper young women didn’t mount their bikes before daylight and go scorching off to greet the sunrise. Fritzi had long ago realized that she wasn’t cut out to be proper, physically or temperamentally. Her Fleetwing, for example, was always her bike, never her “cycle” or, God forbid, her “velocipede.” No matter that she might have wished to be proper (never!)—no matter how greatly her father and mother wished for it, too—she was stuck with being something else entirely. Herself.
And how to define that? So far as she knew, she fit only one recognizable pigeonhole—“actress.”
The cold yellow morning light fell on the city’s busy commercial heart as she headed south along Michigan Boulevard. It fell on telephone and telegraph wires, hack and wagon horses, here and there a humming electric or a puffing steam auto. It fell on the growing crowds of people hurrying along the sidewalks or charging across the manure-littered streets ahead of wheeled vehicles. Fritzi wove in and out of traffic, pedaling hard and swerving often to avoid collisions.
Near an intersection, a dairy wagon had somehow overturned, spilling metal cans and a flood of milk and blocking all of Michigan Boulevard. Fritzi quickly rode up over the curb at the corner and shot west on Jackson two blocks to State, where she went south again. The sun was higher, splashing a storefront near Van Buren that had been converted into a five-cent theater showing pictures that moved. The place was exotically named the Bijou Dream. Display windows were heavily draped, concealing, the public supposed, illicit behavior within. Tastelessly crude signboards on the sidewalk pleaded for patrons.
NEW PROGRAMS DAILY!
WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT FOR GENTLEMEN,
LADIES, AND CHILDREN!
Fritzi sniffed in disdain. A boy in the play group worked at the theater, turning the crank of the projector. He gave his fellow actors free tickets; Fritzi always threw hers in the nearest trash barrel, because respectable people never set foot in such low-class places. As for appearing in one of the crude little story pictures—she’d sooner die. She was, after all, a legitimate actress from the professional theater.
Or would be, again, if she could summon the nerve to get out of town and follow her dream to New York.
2. Drifter
About the same hour, hundreds of miles to the east in Riverdale, a hamlet on the northern edge of New York City, Carl Crown was knocking on doors in search of work and food.
Fritzi’s younger brother had turned twenty-four in November. He’d been wandering without direction ever since Princeton cast him out at the end of his junior year. “Bull” Crown had been a star on the Princeton football line, but a failure in the classroom. He was smart enough, but not diligent, or interested.
For a change Carl was shaved and barbered. In Poughkeepsie he’d swept out a barber shop in exchange for the barber’s services. His oddly assorted clothes were reasonably clean—faded jeans pants, a blue flannel work shirt, a plaid winter coat with a corduroy collar, and high-topped hunter’s boots, laced on the side. He did his best to keep clean, first because he had been brought up that way, and also because it made a better impression at a stranger’s door. Most tramps looked like they’d crawled out of a weed patch, bringing the weeds with them.
All morning doors had slammed in his face. The afternoon was no different. As the wintry sun dropped near the western palisades on the great river, he
was discouraged, and famished. He knocked at the kitchen door of a neat cottage with a white picket fence and a small garden plot lying fallow for the season.
A woman in her early thirties, plain and pale, opened the door. She stepped back a pace, wary. “Yes?” Carl tried not to look at two golden pies cooling on a kitchen table.
“Any work, ma’am? My name’s Carl. I’m just passing through. I’m good with my hands.”
He showed them, clean, the nails kept short by a little file that folded out of his clasp knife. For someone as stocky as Carl, the hands were surprisingly slender and delicate.
The woman looked him up and down in the fading light. “Well, my daughter Hettie wrecked her cycle last Saturday. If you can repair it, I’ll pay you thirty cents. I’m a widow, not mechanical at all.”
From another room a girl called out, “Ma? I need the pot.”
“Hettie,” the widow said. “Broken ankle. Tools are in the shed.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll get right to it while it’s still light.” Carl gave her one of the warm smiles that came naturally to him. He was good looking in an unobtrusive way. He had his father’s short legs, his mother’s long upper body; he resembled Ilsa rather than the General. His hair was thick like hers before it grayed. His brown eyes shone bright like his sister’s.
No longer suspicious, the woman with the lined face smiled back. “Knock when you’re done.” She closed the door as her daughter bleated again.
Carl crossed the yard. The cottage was set on a little rise, with a spectacular view of the graying valley over intervening rooftops. The sky was clear and filled with flawless colors—dark blue shading down to lavender, then vivid red along the palisades. The air was cold and bracing to breathe.
He found the damaged two-wheeler in the shed. It was a black Wright Safety Cycle, manufactured in Dayton by the brothers who’d started in that business while they pursued their studies of aeronautics. Now the Wrights enjoyed worldwide fame and prosperity as a result of their flights at Kitty Hawk and elsewhere; they no longer needed to make or repair bicycles. Aeroplanes and all the mechanical wonders of the age fascinated Carl. He just didn’t have the opportunity, or the wherewithal, to learn about them.
He crouched with one hand resting on the bicycle’s triangular frame. After a minute of study he searched in the shed, found a shelf of old tools. He shoved aside a pile of hacksaw blades and files, picked up a wrench and pliers brown with rust. The pliers slipped from his fingers. As he stepped sideways to catch them, his shoulder hit another shelf, tilting it off its brackets and throwing half a dozen empty fruit jars to the dirt floor. Two broke.
He looked around for a broom. He couldn’t find one. He picked up the largest pieces of glass and after a moment’s consideration dropped them into an empty nail keg. He was annoyed with himself because he’d never licked an unconscious clumsiness born of great strength, high energy, and an urge to get things done fast. All through his childhood and adolescence, his mother had feared for her fine furniture and dishes. He never meant to damage things, but it happened. Sometimes it left a mess that he didn’t know how to clean up. This time it wasn’t so hard, a matter of minutes to put the other large pieces in the keg and with his heel grind the smaller ones to gleaming dust.
A dog barked in the distance. Someone played “My Gal Sal” on a parlor reed organ. For a moment he felt lonely and lost, drifting through life without a plan, a destination, or two nickels to rub together most of the time. He tried not to think about it as he set to work.
He demounted the front wheel and patched the flat balloon tire, punctured in the mishap. He straightened the bent fork with his bare hands. He finished the job in twenty minutes. He didn’t want to tell the widow how easy it was, so he wiped his greasy fingers on a rag and walked to the picket fence, gazing at the enormous western sky. The vista brought memories of the years spent in New Jersey during his disastrous college career.
He still remembered vividly the day it had ended. On a Friday in May 1904, Carl’s father arrived in Princeton in response to a letter from the university president. The General stepped off the local from New York at two in the morning, grimy, tired, and in short temper. “I do not like to be taken away from business because of your scholastic failings,” he said as Carl conducted him to the Nassau Inn for what remained of the night.
The General was calmer, refreshed with a shave and talc on his cheeks, when he preceded a nervous Carl into the president’s office at nine the next morning. Dr. Woodrow Wilson, a lawyer and the son of a Presbyterian cleric, was a prim and austere man whose smile always had a forced quality. Pince-nez on a ribbon only heightened his severity. The General took the visitor’s chair. Carl stood behind him, praying this would go the way he hoped.
Dr. Wilson reviewed Carl’s record at the university. He had attended for four academic years and still had the status of a junior. Wilson made only passing reference to the accomplishments of the Princeton eleven’s star lineman. The president’s conclusion was dry and devoid of sympathy:
“Facts are facts, General. I am afraid we have no choice but to suspend Carl until such time as remedial work elsewhere merits his reinstatement.”
Carl wanted to jump up and shout hurrah. He loved the sociability of college, the hard knocks of football, the thrill when Princeton scored on a bright autumn afternoon. But he didn’t love academics.
The General placed both hands on the silver head of his cane. “I do want to observe that I’ve made substantial contributions to this school, Dr. Wilson.”
“I am certainly aware of it, sir. Princeton is grateful. But we can’t afford to mar our reputation with any taint of special privilege. Failing grades are failing grades.” He removed his eyeglasses. “I’m sorry.”
At the depot afterward, as the New York local clanged and steamed in, the General said, “Many fathers would disown a son who behaved so recklessly. I did that to your brother Joe and regretted it later. I won’t repeat my mistake. But neither will I support a son who has failed to repay my investment in his education. You may have a job at the brewery, and earn your keep henceforth.”
It took all of Carl’s nerve to say, “I’m sorry, Pop, I don’t want to work in the brewery the rest of my life.”
Carl could see that the words hurt his father, but the General’s response was tightly reined anger. “Where, then, may I ask?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, until you decide, you’re on your own. Just don’t look to me for help. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re a grown man, Carl. Matured physically if not in character as yet.” That stung. “Look out for yourself. Avoid bad companions. Maybe this spell will pass in a few weeks. If so, we have a place for you at home. You mean a great deal to your mother and me, never forget that.”
Father embraced son, the General boarded the car, and the train pulled out….
At the picket fence Carl shook himself out of the reverie. He still believed in all the possibilities represented by the new century and its wonderful new machines. But where in that great landscape of adventure and opportunity did he belong? He hadn’t found the place—maybe never would.
His cousin Paul had faced the same grim possibility for years; he’d confessed it once in a long talk with Carl. Paul found his place, behind a camera. “You’ll find yours unless you give up too soon. But you won’t, Carl. You’re not that kind.”
He knocked at the kitchen door to tell the widow he’d finished the job. She paid him, then fed him supper and handed him two blankets.
“You can sleep in the shed if you want. I should tell you that the sheriff and his men are hard on tramps. In the morning I’d advise you to move on.”
“Sure,” Carl said, smiling in a wry way. “I’m used to that.”
3. Paul and His Wife
A day later, across the Atlantic in crowded and clamorous London, Carl and Fritzi’s cousin Paul was anxiously pacing on the north side of Derby Ga
te where it intersected Victoria Embankment by the river. It was Friday; Parliament was not sitting. Most MP’s would be found in their offices in the building across the way.
“See them?” Paul asked his friend Michael, a reporter for the London Light.
“Not yet,” Michael called from the corner. He was looking south toward the Underground entrance near Bridge Road, with Big Ben and the Gothic splendor of Westminster Palace just beyond.
Paul Crown was twenty-nine. He was a professional cameraman who filmed “actualities”—dramatic events and rare sights from all over the globe. He’d learned his trade in Chicago, working for a profane genius named Colonel R. Sidney Shadow. Before the colonel died he sold the assets of the American Luxograph Company to a British press baron who kept the company name and its star camera operator; Paul had moved his family to London three years ago.
Paul’s camera stood on the curbstone, amid a cluster of reporters and still photographers. There were three other cameras similar to his, belonging to competitors. The WSPU march had been planned for some time, though not publicized. Somehow word of it had reached the authorities and the press.
The man from Pathé said, “Hey, Dutch, what happens if they toss your missus in the clink?” In America, all Germans were “Dutch.” The nickname had stuck.
“Then I guess I’ll feed the kiddies for a while,” Paul said with a forced grin. He worried about Julie taking part in marches, but he knew better than to ask her to stay home. Paul’s wife was an ardent “New Woman.” Perhaps it was a reaction to her girlhood in Chicago, when her nervously sick mother had repressed Julie’s every impulse toward independence and forced her into a short-lived and loveless marriage.
Michael hurried back from his outpost. “They just came up from the tube. Oh, what a bloody menace to society,” he said with his usual sarcasm.